


Khamsin

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Breathplay, M/M, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:22:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a storm coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Khamsin

The sky above Tel Aviv is a dense, burnt yellow - sand hanging, swirling in the air like a million million swarming bees. He can see a corner of it through the window as he lies on the bed, a flash of sky that is usually such a clear paintbox blue. He can taste it, too, feel it in his hair, itching his scalp. The feeling of dust fragments blowing against his skin in the breeze, walking down Namir, steaming cardboard box in his hands, had been almost claustrophobic. There are warnings on the radio for asthma sufferers to stay indoors. The storm isn't so much of a threat as an inconvenience to everyone else, but Pyro had ducked his head as protection against the wind, and tried not to think of bodies lost in desert dunes, mouths filled with sand, still gasping for air.

The _mazgan_ blows icy air on his face, now. He swallows it whole, his cheeks freezing, smelling the condensation in the air. The air conditioning is up far too high, even for this time of year, and after a while it'll be dripping streams of water down the painted walls. But he needs the reassurance, and Erik isn't here to berate him for the waste of electricity, for the mold that will eventually form on the walls, or for his childish fears. Erik hasn't been here for a while, his coat and hat missing from their hooks, even though the temperature outside is pushing into the 40s.

Pyro closes his eyes and imagines winter in New York, when the air would freeze in his lungs, when even the lukewarm pizza cooling nearby would be welcome warmth. Now it's an irritation. Too hot to eat when he still has sweat on his back, clothes soaked through from the humidity. As he cools, the sweat is chilling him like a fever. He's not meant for this desert country.

An unmarked calendar hangs on the wall, a freebie from the _Jerusalem Post_ , which Erik reads religiously every day. He crosses the days off in his mind. Almost a year since he arrived in Israel, on a mission to bring Erik _home_ , wherever home was. To return him to the Brotherhood, to the cause. But there’s been no cause for a year. There’s been no Brotherhood. There have just been Erik and John, renting apartments, wandering city streets, busy doing nothing.

He’s wearing baggy jeans with an olive-green IDF-issue belt. Sandals. A touristy t-shirt with the Hebrew for _Coca-Cola_ splashed over it. The plastic wallet melted into his back pocket carries a student ID for Tel Aviv University. He goes there sometimes, attends classes on Jewish heritage alongside rich kids from North America. He’s not a good student, but no one really is. He’s expected to goof off. He’s expected to be clueless on the streets, to get lost, to speak broken and embarrassingly bad Hebrew. He fits in perfectly.

He has one arm folded behind his head, one hand down the front of his jeans, uncomfortably tight, uncomfortably warm. The sweat tickling his back makes him squirm against the bedsheets as he pulls on his cock, squeezing the softness out of it, then letting go, with only the trace of fingertips keeping himself in touch with the fringes of pleasure. _Control_. Xavier’s lessons in control, in patience, had bored him. Erik is, however, no more liberal a teacher.

They practice as often as they can. Control. Accuracy. Power. All exercised in the darkest of places, in backlots and fields and hotel rooms. Pyro once joked that it felt like prostitution, like doing something natural yet illicit. Erik hadn’t laughed, but he hadn’t argued, either.

Erik’s own powers are still a mystery. He doesn’t use them, if he has them. If he doesn’t have them, he doesn’t whine. Pyro simply has a tooth-rattling kiss and vague suspicions to keep his fear at bay. Believing that Erik, that _Magneto_ , was nothing more than a bag of flesh like the old men who play chess in the park, would have been too much to bear. So he keeps his silence, and every time a shipping container rattles as they pass, he tells himself that it’s something more significant than the wind.

He’s hard. Too hard. Skin pressing against the ragged edge of his zipper. Pyro glances at the closed door, takes a breath, and forces himself to stop, to let go. His fingers tangle up in pubic hair, and pull. The vague, tugging pain is enough to set his mind back onto other courses. He can’t think about coming just yet.

Erik should have been back by now, he thinks, even though he never has any real idea where Erik goes, or why, or when he intends to return. Erik should be back, eating pizza, asking the ritual of questions, making sure Pyro has been careful. The absence worries him, makes him restless. Erik’s too smart to be caught, but Pyro isn’t smart enough to do without him. For a year, Erik has taken away all of his responsibility, all of his needs. He has been the General, and Pyro has been his foot soldier, loyal to a fault, willing to disappear into insignificance if that is his General’s command. In Erik’s absence, he has no purpose. He lies, and breathes recirculated air, and masturbates.

The door opens just as the sky darkens enough to switch on the street lights, the faint yellow tint to the day dissolving into gray. Pyro’s eyes flicker towards the lock.

“John,” Erik says, his tone neutral as the door swings back into place, and he takes off his hat with the practiced finesse of a silent movie star. His eyes linger a moment on the bulge Pyro’s hand is making in his jeans, before glancing towards the unopened pizza box. “Dinner?”

Pyro sits up, swinging his legs off the bed. The room now seems too cold for comfort. “There’s a sandstorm.”

Erik tips the lid of the pizza box back with a finger. “Yes. The _khamsin_. A desert wind. They say it lasts for fifty days.”

“Fifty?” Pyro raises his eyebrows, even less motivated to turn off the air conditioning.

A smile drifts onto Erik’s lips. “So they say.” He extracts a pizza slice from the box, its consistency now closely matching its cardboard container. “Pepperoni? How delightfully rebellious, John.” He holds it out for Pyro to take. “A little warmth, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Pyro doesn’t mind, but he still burns and blackens the edges with the naked flame at his fingertips. Erik sits at the table, on one of two cheap plastic chairs, looking far too respectable for this dingy room. On worse days, he looks old. In the first hotel, Pyro had felt duty-bound to correct the receptionist’s ideas that Erik was his grandfather. “Uncle,” he had said, although that was no less a lie. “Boss” would have brought suspicion. “Lover”, disgust. Now, when the staff inquire, he just smiles, and nods, and says nothing. Let him be a tourist. Let him be a teenage boy on vacation with his grandfather. Let it all be simple. Let everyone see the world in the way they did yesterday. Challenge nothing.

“This happens every year?” he asks, after warning Erik not to burn his fingers on the bread and half-melted cheese.

Erik takes a moment to savour the smell of the food. “Every year that I’ve been here. Every spring, a storm is whipped up by the desert winds, and part of the Negev returns to Tel Aviv. Change is afoot, my dear boy.”

Pyro has often wished that he could know exactly when Erik is being metaphorical. “Training tonight?”

“No, not tonight.” Erik swallows a mouthful. “You can take the bus to Ramat HaSharon if you like. See a film. Have fun.”

Pyro nods. Anything he could say would sound non-committal, and that’s hardly an attitude Erik appreciates. “It’s hard to breathe out there,” he says. “I get dust in my eyes.”

“It’ll be gone by morning.” Erik gets up, goes to the sink, searching for a glass of water.

It was never supposed to end like this, exchanging pleasantries, talking about the weather, even if there’s still a lingering sense of danger on the edges of this life. Pyro lies back on the bed, watching Erik out of the corner of his eyes, trying to remember what he had looked like when he was still Magneto. Pyro had given up his life, his friends, and his safety for that man, that _hero_. He had burned, then. He had been a surging lifeforce encased in steel, too volatile to touch. Now he’s an aged professor in a shirt and gray trousers: thin, white-haired, the kind of man Pyro would have knocked down in the street. The kind of man to whom he would never have given a second thought.

Sometimes, he looks into Erik’s focused blue eyes, and wonders what used to be there that made him fall in love. _Magnetism_ , he thinks sometimes, and laughs. If only it were a joke.

He locks his eyes on the ceiling, once more, and undoes the button at the waist of his jeans, pulling down the fly that used to be torn apart in a second by no human hands. He’s not hard, anymore, but his body remembers the temptation of moments ago. It remembers the longed-for, and denied release. There’s a rush, tingling and addictive, that goes through him, an urge to just hurry the fuck up and come. It’s fear, too. It’s Erik’s eyes on him.

He’s not huge, but he feels it, blood pumping, cock swelling in his hand like an injury. _Abusing yourself_ , his mother had called it, once. Fuck. Well, he wants to be abused.

“John,” the voice says softly.

Pyro closes his eyes. In the darkness, the itch of sand in his hair becomes an irritation once more. He imagines kneeling in the desert, a clear blue-black sky above him, head bowed to watch himself jack off as the storm grows. He imagines himself a sand-blasted corpse, still moving, burnt alive by no kind of fire. Skin torn away, exposed, ripped apart. There’s no blood. It’s all been cauterized in the veins, and he can feel the heat if he reaches out to touch it. He’ll burn himself if he’s not careful.

His hand is ripped away with no warning, with such force that his entire body is thrown to one side. His shoulder feels like it’s been dislocated. It’s burning. His neck aches, nerves twisted and stunned. Despite this, he opens his eyes slowly, unsure of what he might find.

In the end, it’s too slow. A hand – a real, human hand, this time – digs into the back of his neck, pressing his face hard into the sheets. His nose feels like it’s breaking. Pyro coughs, and tries to move, an action that is more instinctual than anything. He knows Erik won’t let him go anywhere.

“Pyro,” Erik says at his ear, and there might be a hint of humor in that tone, but Pyro’s capacity for rational thought has been lost between the pain in his head, and the desire at his groin. “My dear boy.”

He’s always face-down when Erik fucks him. The pull of his jeans away from his hips is nothing new. He’s grown to like the roughness of it. The need. But Erik’s hand is still a dark pressure on the back of his head, and now even the darkness is becoming blurred at the edges. His cock is stiff and hard under him, painful, desperate. He wants to come more than he wants to breathe.

Erik burns inside him. Erik’s invulnerable. Even naked, even aroused and flushed and coming, Erik’s clothed in steel.

 _This is suffocation_ , he thinks. He’s heard the words before. _This is choking_. This is the nightmare of every child, to be helpless to the whim of Magneto. That evil fiend in the helmet. Those cold eyes. So very cold.

He feels Erik come in him at the same instant he tastes air on his lips. It’s so cold, so wet, so much of a relief, that he mistakes it for water, blended with the sensation of sweat and come and blood. Is there blood? He can’t remember. He feels wounded. He feels alive.

“There’s a storm coming,” Magneto says.

Pyro can’t tell whether this is a memory, a dream, or a hope.

He goes to sleep with lungs full of sand.


End file.
